[lifeisstillgood]

The usual (and frankly convincing) argument is that you won't get to a billion users without using the cruft as a means of scaffolding to help change and iterate and try new features, whatever the behind the scenes architecture looks like

Then, when you have 100 million users, you can afford a team of optimisation specialists to strip out that 1% battery life

But yes, it seems on average npm pulls in 1,000 upstream packages when you just try making a vanilla project of any complexity